A CRIMINAL HISTORY OF MANKIND

England was another case in point. It is true that the French Revolution had frightened the
governing classes, so that they banned Paine’s Rights of Man and tried to repress radicalism. But
they were sensible and moderate about it. In fact, after Napoleon had been beaten, young Tories
took the lead in abolishing some of the horribly repressive laws which had been enacted to deal
with the great crime wave of the previous century, and to allow greater political freedom. While
Charles X was trying to take away the vote from the French middle classes, English reformers were
doing their best to extend it to anybody who paid a rent of ten pounds a year; in 1832 they
succeeded, and the first Reform Bill was passed. In 1867, a nee reform bill gave workers in the
cities a right to vote. By 1884, every male had a right to vote. So although there were agitations and
riots in Britain, there was no explosion. By 1800, Robert Owen had set up his own socialist
community at New Lanark and demonstrated that co-operative principles actually work. And in the
second half of the century, upper class socialists such as John Ruskin, William Morris and H. M.
Hyndman had turned socialism into something almost as respectable as Methodism or Quakerism.
Unfortunately, for better or for worse, society in Russia, France, Prussia and Austria was far more
polarised. It was divided into the aristocracy and the people in rather the same way that society on a
farm is divided into people and animals. This, unfortunately, was a fact. Socialists, out of the
goodness of their hearts, stood for the working man. But they then went on to make rather silly
assertions, such as Pierre Joseph Proudhon’s dictum that ‘Property is theft’, which made the ruling
classes grind their teeth. No zoologist had yet observed that all living creatures have their own
‘territory’, and that therefore property, far from being theft, is deeply embedded in animal instinct.
But the non-socialists felt in their bones that these arguments about a past Golden Age, when Adam
delved and Eve span and everybody loved one another, were woolly-minded nonsense. And
meanwhile these socialists - or, as they were now calling themselves, revolutionaries - were
asserting that society would never be peaceful and stable until all the rich had been robbed of their
wealth and all the land was held in common. It was impossible to take them seriously. All that
could be done was to banish them or shoot them. But that only made things worse. In 1825, a group
of Russian officers known as the Decembrists - because that was the month of their revolt - tried to
overthrow the new tsar, Nicholas I, and obtain a constitution; Nicholas was forced to shoot the
ringleaders and exile the rest. Russia had been drifting in the direction of liberalism, but after the
Decembrist revolt, she became more reactionary than Prussia or Austria. Nicholas’s successor,
Alexander II, actually took the tremendous step of abolishing serfdom (1861), and was assassinated
by a revolutionary for his pains.
So it would be an oversimplification to regard Metternich, Talleyrand and the rest as reactionaries
who wanted to suppress all freedom of speech. They wanted what everyone else wanted: peace and
prosperity. And they honestly regarded the socialists as criminals who were using a specious false
logic to justify their attempts at robbery. They recalled what had happened during the French
Revolution, when the power had simply fallen into the hands of a new set of tyrants, and assumed
that what the socialists wanted was to seize the power for themselves.
They were by no means entirely wrong. A case in point was the German agitator Karl Marx, whom
the tolerant English had allowed to settle in London. He was the son of a wealthy Jewish lawyer
(who in turn was the son of a rabbi), and had spent his childhood in pleasant and elegant
surroundings in Trier, in the Rhineland. He also became engaged to the girl next door, Jenny, the
daughter of Baron von Westphalen. His father wanted him to be a lawyer; Marx believed he was
destined to be a great poet, a second Goethe. He studied first at the University of Bonn, then at
Berlin. Here there was great intellectual ferment, and Marx plunged into it with delight. The